The present invention relates to the field of workflow process management and more particularly to a system and method for performing flexible workflow process execution in a distributed workflow management system.
Workflow process re-engineering, that is, the fundamental rethinking and re-implementation of workflow processes to achieve never-before-possible levels of quality, cost, throughput and service, is emerging as one of the crucial business strategies of the 1990s. The need for re-engineering is especially significant in an era of workforce downsizing coupled with greater demands for shortened time to market and faster customer response. Moreover, the need is pervasive. Organizations are currently engaging in workflow process re-engineering in many domains, including financial services, telecommunications services, healthcare services, customer order fulfillment, manufacturing procedure automation and electronic commerce.
While workflow process re-engineering provides a business management concept, workflow process management (WFPM) software--or more accurately, middleware--provides the enabling technologies for actually performing workflow process re-engineering. WFPM supports flexible solutions for the management of enterprise-wide operations, including workflow process control, automation and monitoring; resource allocation, authorization and authentication; task initialization and data exchange; and end-to-end communication and security. However, while WFPM offers an overall environment and approach to unifying, automating and measuring workflow processes, it is not limited to supporting workflow process re-engineering and can be used to manage existing nonautomated legacy or work processes.
In general, WFPM systems perform a wide range of tasks. For instance, they can provide a method for defining and managing the flow of a work process or support the definition of resources and their attributes. In addition, they can assign resources to work, determine which steps will be executed next within a work process and when they will be executed and can ensure that the workflow process continues until proper termination. Moreover, they can notify resources about pending work, enforce administrative policies, such as access control and track execution and support user inquiries of status. Finally, they can provide history information in the form of an audit trail for completed workflow processes and collect statistical data for process and resource bottleneck analysis, flow optimization and automatic workload balancing.
Moreover, given the trend towards open systems and standards, a WFPM system must coexist with and take advantage of standards-based commercial products for network communication, legacy application invocation and system monitoring. In particular, these standards include the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (OSF DCE), Hewlett Packard's OpenView and the International Standards Organization Open Systems Interconnection (ISO OSI) X.400 technologies.
Workflow process execution should be correct, efficient and flexible. Flexible execution of workflow processes is important in a dynamic workflow environment. For example, a workflow process might need to be modified after being started. A resource manager might not be able to find resources for the workflow activities and a workflow assigned to an activity might not be able to perform the assigned task. A WFPM system must be flexible enough to cope with these situations to provide correct and efficient workflow process execution.
Existing workflow products adopt a centralized process execution strategy which requires all workflows to be registered with the WFPM system before use. The relationships between WFPM systems and resource managers, that is, built-in resource managers, and between workflow activities and resources specified at process definition time are static. Thus, the process execution is inefficient, as some resource managers and workflows might be heavily loaded while others remain idle. The approach is also inflexible, as it is difficult to change resource manager and workflow at runtime, particularly during resource assignment or application execution processing.
Therefore, what is needed is a flexible and preferably decentralized WFPM system able to dynamically redefine the relationships between the WFPM system and resource managers.
There is a further need for a flexible WFPM system capable of dynamically redefining workflow activity and resource definitions to efficiently perform process execution. Such a WFPM system would preferably balance the distribution of such process execution between resource managers and workflows to minimize overloading and idle time.
There is still a further need for a flexible WFPM system capable of dynamically change resource assignments and application execution processing to resource managers and workflows at runtime.